Winter time 2026 in Czechia: clocks go back on 25 October

In Czechia, winter time begins on Sunday, 25 October 2026: at 3:00 the clocks go back to 2:00, so the night from Saturday to Sunday is an hour longer. Winter time will last five months, until the last Sunday of March — 28 March 2027.

Standard Central European Time, mistakenly known as “winter” time, is in fact the regular time. Daylight saving time was introduced to lengthen the usable part of the day and save on artificial lighting. According to today’s energy experts, changing the clocks has practically no effect on electricity consumption. Summer time is good for mood and body rhythm, but the shift itself is hard to bear: statistics show that the number of traffic accidents rises shortly after each change.

Under EU rules, the switch happens in all time zones at once — on the last Sunday of March and October. In the US and Canada, summer time starts on the second Sunday of March and winter time on the first Sunday of November; some parts of Canada do not use it at all. Daylight saving is a feature of temperate countries; in the tropics the length of day in summer and winter barely differs.

Summer time was first introduced in 1916, during the First World War, in several countries including Germany, Austria-Hungary and Britain. In Czechoslovakia, annual clock changes began in 1979. The EU was once expected to change the clocks for the last time in 2021, but the pandemic and disagreement over which time should stay permanent pushed the question aside. In 2021 the Czech government kept the clock changes for another five years, and in 2026 it extended them for five more — until 2031.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz